I don't expect to hear back from Mitchell Waters of Curtis Brown, not when it's been almost two months since I sent the query. And it's six weeks of waiting on Susan Ginsburg of Writers House, but there may yet be a SASE turning up in the mail. It will be a rejection, of course. Requests for partials come quickly, and usually via e-mail.
Only Joy Tutela of David Black's fine agency and Jonathan Dolger (on his own) have yet to reply on the other manuscript that I haven't been pursuing recently because the query letter was a flop. They've had four months to think about it, and that lack of response would be a no, would it not? Who needs the rejection letter in the mail to confirm what should be obvious?
Is there any point in sending queries now? By the last couple of weeks in August, the publishing industry has decamped for vacation destinations, houses in the Hamptons and the like, so no one is around to open the mail.
But I'll work up another query letter anyway and send it off anyway, so that I can be right there at the head of the line that starts moving after Labor Day. If I can just come up with a hook that intrigues, gives an idea of the plot, but shows that the novel is fresh and new and not a rehash of every other manuscript in the slush pile.
It would be easier to solve the crisis in the Middle East.
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